(Melbourne, Australia)

I got inspired by Shannon Bennett.

Some of the things Wikipedia says about Shannon Bennett is:

Bennett was invited to be the first Australian member of the associations Jeunes Restaurateurs D’Europe and Le Grand Tables Du Monde. In 2007 Shannon was a guest chef at New York’s Star Chefs Congress. Vue de Monde was awarded Restaurant of the Year in The Age Good Food Guide, 2013 and 2014.

What I say about him is: Amazing.

A couple of days ago I had the honor of enjoying a 7-course meal in his restaurant on top of the Rialto Tower in Melbourne.
(Yes, that is one of the perks of being a speaker: you get to take part in some fantastic events that companies take their most important clients on….)

As an author I should not be at a loss of words, but the experience of eating at Shannons restaurant made me speechless. Not only because the food was amazing (it was) but perhaps even more because of the holistic approach that Shannon has taken to being great in anything or everything that he does.

Some examples:

One of the wines that had been paired with the food at our dinner came from 2 bottles that there only existed 12 bottles of in the whole of Australia. (The wine cellar in the restaurant had 4000 (!) bottles in storage.)

The restaurant only takes in something like 60 guests per night (and have almost as many staff as they have guests!)

The water system in the restaurant comes from Japan and is called “E-water”, which means the restaurant cleans all its kitchen stuff (and their chefs hands) with Electrolyzed Water which means no soap is needed. (Even the guest toilets have that system, but there they had to put in some soap because the guests did not trust the system.)

They grow their own herbs in their own gardens, even their own truffles!

They use fish caught on a line (instead of a net) and killed using Ikejime – a Japanese method of paralysing fish to maintain its quality to minimise the stress hormones in the meat.

And so on and so on.

In other words, an attitude of always trying to be the best.

I am writing this post because Shannon inspired me.

This blog doesn’t really have a target audience. I am not blogging on the topics that I speak on (Creativity, Change and Global Mindset), and I am not running this blog to be a “thought leader” on those topics. Instead I am writing this blog for myself to force myself to write things down that will make me better as a speaker. (It is a bonus if it also inspires other speakers to improve as well.)

After 8 months of running this blog I know it has helped me by making me sit down and reflect on what I do, how I do it and how I can become better at doing what I do.

This time I was helped by being reminded of the quest to always be the best you can do by an Australian chef in Melbourne. Tomorrow it might be someone totally different that helps me in a totally different way.

Who is helping you become better as a speaker and how?

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There are famous speakers and then there are non famous speakers.

The way to tell the difference is that the famous speaker get’s a bigger round of applause BEFORE going up on stage than other speakers get when they are done..

Like the audience is happy just by the fact that they get to listen to this speaker.

Today I went and listen to one such speaker: Steve Wozniak (founder of Apple and inventor of one of the first personal computers.)

He was speaking at the same EY conference I spoke at on Monday and I went back there today just to hear him speak.
I wanted to know what I (as a “non famous speaker”) could learn from him – a “famous speaker”.

This is what I learnt:

1) Be passionate.

Mr Wozniak has a burning interest in technology and new things. When he spoke about a new gadget that he has bought that makes his phone beep when his bag comes out from the luggage carrousel at the airport the audience was laughing at the silliness of the invention and at the same time out of shared happiness over how excited he seemed over such a small little thing. Passion about a specific subject is contagious – not only in the sense that others might want to learn more about the subject the person is interested in – but even in the way that people get inspired to become passionate about ANY subject.

It’s like that line from “When Harry met Sally”: “I’ll have what she is having…”

2) Be humble

There are basically two kinds of famous speakers – the ones who start to think that they are special because they are well known, and the ones who become humbled by their fame and success.

Woz is clearly the second type. And it resonated so well with the audience.

When he told the story about how he personally sold off Apple stock to Apple employees who had not gotten stock options before the IPO so that many of them would make “enough to buy a house” you could hear how the respect for him as a person grew.
3) Have fun

Steve was so clearly enjoying life and having fun. But he was also enjoying being there on stage. It did not, in any way, feel like he was there because some company (in this case EY) had paid him to come, he gave off the feeling that he could have come for free. (I am very sure he did not…)

When I look at the three things I wrote down as “take aways” from his speech the common denominator is that he made himself human.

Which I find a very interesting observation since “fame” often seems to be about creating a persona that is bigger than the actual person.

It might be easy to think that one should feed that “bigger persona” by being a “guru”, a “celebrity” or a “star” on stage.
But as Steve Wozniak showed today, it might actually be a smarter strategy to just be human.

And that is advice that works for all speakers – not just the famous ones.

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